Gabrielle Goliath's Elegy, the work at the centre of one of the year's most bitter censorship disputes, has gone on show in London. The private foundation Ibraaz is presenting the multi-channel installation until 17 January 2027, alongside Joe Namy's Cosmic Breath, a sound work of ten megaphones playing the call to prayer that was commissioned by the Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah in 2023 and has barely been seen since.

Elegy was selected to represent South Africa at the 61st Venice Biennale, but in January the country's minister of sport, arts and culture, Gayton McKenzie, cancelled the pavilion, calling the inclusion of a suite commemorating the Palestinian poet Hiba Abu Nada — killed in an Israeli airstrike in October 2023 — "divisive". Goliath refused to remove the material, took the decision to court, and lost. Ibraaz and the Bertha Foundation then stepped in to mount the work independently in the Chiesa di Sant'Antonin in Venice, where it ran from the Biennale's opening in May until the end of July.

The work itself has been a decade in the making. Elegy is a long-term series of performances and video works in which a succession of women stand and sing a single mournful note; as each woman's breath runs out, another takes her place. For the Biennale edition, Goliath dedicated suites to rape culture in South Africa, the murder of LGBTQ+ people, the Herero and Nama genocide in Namibia in the early 20th century, and Abu Nada's death.

Ibraaz, which opened its Fitzrovia space last October, frames the show as proof of its "brave space" mission. Programmes director Hammad Nasar notes that there is "no shortage of artworks that are being censored right now", and says the foundation wants works people are not getting access to elsewhere. Few works in recent years have embodied that brief more literally than Elegy — a pavilion cancelled by a government minister, now rebuilt in a London gallery.